Discard Trope: Right Out of My Clothes [replace merge]

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Created By: Skybunny on September 26, 2013 Last Edited By: Skybunny on July 27, 2015

Nuked

Right Out of My Clothes [replace merge]

Onscreen clothing loss associated with blunt force or snap movement

Name Space:Main

Page Type:Trope

Closed TRS thread: [1] (instructed to create a new YKTTW rather than fix via TRS).Additional background: Powers That Be do not want to rename the existing trope because it already exists, even though Right Out of My Clothes made it into production without ever going through an approval process and is by TRS's own admission, "a mess". Again,[2]THEREFORE:Proposal: replace the description text of Right Out of My Clothes with this, and merge examples from this with those of that page, as describing the "same thing, but better". At some point in the future a rename to something better could possibly happen, but a lot of good work is mired in YKTTW purgatory if this isn't done.

One moment a character is wandering through life, oblivious. In the next, some or all of their clothing is drifting to the ground like fallen leaves.

Gags that often set this trope into motion include an impact strong enough to literally smack the victim's clothes off (as in Getting the Boot, or the Plank Gag), or said outfit getting snagged whole by an obstacle along the way, like a tree or briar bush. If a nearby object or character is OffLikeAShot, its field of effect may carry the victim's outfit along even if the character is not.

A variation where clothing a character wears doubles as a costume and is lost in this manner can lead to The Reveal, or a Dramatic Unmask.

Sometimes the victim's clothes will float for a few seconds in their original position before falling to the ground, fall to pieces around the character, or they'll simply fly offscreen piecemeal to be absorbed into Hammerspace - or the next scene over.

This can also be self inflicted by the effects of FlipTakes, WildTakes, a SlipperySkid, or other equally acrobatic clumsiness. If the character is OffLikeAShot, they may exit their clothes as well as the current scene, if they dash off fast enough.

Examples

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The Trix Rabbit frequently fell victim to this trope as his disguises to get Trix cereal are foiled by his excitement in having the bowl in his hands at last. Whether by The Pratfall, Facefault, or Wild Take, this would result in anything from the Rabbit's headgear to his entire costume falling off, making his not-a-kid identity plain. "It's the Rabbit!"

Comic Books

Happens often in Astérix, with Romans getting knocked off their sandals from an uppercut by one of the Gauls, usually Obelix.

Films — Animation

Pinocchio, in a scene on Pleasure Island, in which bad boys turn into donkeys after misbehaving. The Coachman interrogates a boy turned donkey wearing only a blue hat, shirt, and shoes as to his name. When the boy can only answer with "Haw!", the Coachman rips off the boy's shirt, then kicks the donkey into a crate, knocking the ill-fitting shoes and his hat clean off him.

A Running Gag in Peanuts is that whenever Charlie Brown pitches for his baseball team, the opposing batter hits the ball back at him so hard it knocks him right out of his clothes, usually accompanied by a frame with socks, shoes, shirt, etc. flying through the air. He is otherwise completely unharmed.

Attack Hello, as seen in Calvin and Hobbes when Hobbes pounces Calvin when he comes back from school. Calvin's shoes are nearly always sent flying off his feet. Socks, a jacket, hat and a backpack (if he's just come back from school) have also been flung off at one time or another, by the force of Hobbes's pounce.

Mickey's Birthday Party (1942), Donald loses his shirt to an overzealous dance toss.

The Clock Watcher (1945): Donald, working as a gift wrapper, has a huge number of gifts to wrap sent down a conveyor, passing him. The pile speeds by so quickly that his hat and shirt are sucked clear off him in the direction of the gifts.

In The Three Caballeros, Donald is chasing after bathers in Acapulco when he is yanked right out of his bathing suit, which continues the chase on its own.

The 1935 Disney Silly Symphony The Tortoise and the Hare uses variants of this several times as the lighting fast rabbit zips past spectators...a smartly dressed owl and stork lose their snappy outfits AND feathers; a tree is stripped of its leaves in what passes for arboreal nudity.

In the Pixar shortFor the Birds, after the large bird is pecked off of the telephone wire, all the little birds lose their feathers as they are shot up into the air by the recoiling line.

Real Life

The specific case of "Knock your socks off" (encompassed in this trope) was tested by MythBusters. Their conclusion: Busted. The kinetic energy from a battering ram, let alone a punch, could not knock the socks off of Buster by pure force alone. The team WAS able to remove socks off of dummy legs with a shockwave generated by high explosives, but the explosion would be fatal even at the maximum distance required for them to be blown off.

Note that one shot of the vertical pneumatic cannon did knock his shoes off and the shoes pulled the socks halfway off. Unfortunately the socks were not completely off and the cannon was far stronger than any boxer.

In a revisit of the myth, the team even redid the same tests including a new set of tests using the best set of variables possible (smooth, shaven legs wearing loose-fitting woolen socks) to see if they would get knocked off and were still unsuccessful with the original tests. However, while they ultimately were able to knock the socks off of Buster (as well as his hands and his entire left leg), it required hitting him with a vehicle-mounted battering ram at 65 MPH, roughly 10,000 times the kinetic force of a human boxer.

Yeah, it's an idiom... there's a definition over here. http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/knock+socks+off . It works doubly because it actually means 'surprise', and of course there's the literal 'knock one's socks off their feet' which the trope is kind of talking about in terms of clothing.

^ Right Out Of My Clothes would certainly need to go through TRS to get a rename. But it doesn't have any misuse as far as I can tell or very many problems except for lacking examples. I think it mostly just Needs Wiki Magic Love.

^^ To be honest with you I assumed you had gone through TRS when I first saw this.

Like kjnoren said. If you want to actually replace Right Out OF My Clothes with this, and give it a rename you're going about this a bit backwards. You would need to make a TRS thread to rename it. Renaming pages is something Tvtropes take very seriously. It's never done lightly. And you can't launch this while there's an existing page that covers it, because you'd just create a duplicate trope.

If instead you just used this YKTTW to collect examples to add to the current page, and not change the description or the name. That'd probably be okay.

^^^ No, "Knock Your Socks Off" isn't a Stock Phrase. It's an idiom. It can be made less personal by naming the trope Knock Their Socks Off. Otherwise I think the phrase is fine, but I have a reservation in that the trope won't be able to use its idiomatic meaning (to surprise) and only the literal one.

I'm not sure dragging someone out of their clothes should be part of this trope.

One case that maybe should be included is the zip that sometimes is done in cartoons - the character runs away so fast that they leave their clothes behind for a moment, and the clothing instead follows after. Usually this is done by the character leaving the screen, and they wear their clothes next time we see them (usually right after).

I need opinions here...getting some time away from this one has me thinking that 'Right Out Of Their Clothes' is such a mess because it has SEVERAL tropes buried in it, like...

Travelling At The Speed Of Bared (This is high speed movement causing the wearer or nearby spectators to lose their clothes/fur/etc.; can even be 'nearby characters losing their hats when a character blows by')

^Yeah. I just wish that I didn't have to go through all this administrata essentially because 'someone added an ill-described trope without it going through the process that makes it a keeper'. If you look at Right Out Of My Clothes, you can see that it has very few examples, a hugely general description, and very few interlinks. It never would have made it out of YKTTW as it was published.

In the next-gen iterations of Soul Calibur this is exaggerated: character clothing and armor inexplicably breaks off from large blunt force impacts. This becomes ridiculous with create-a-character clothing, which always shatters and leaves the character without any clothes on save their underwear, which never "breaks." Too much starch.

Courage The Cowardly Dog. In, "Stormy Weather," as the Storm Goddess' rage intensifies, so does the storm cloud that constantly hovers above her; at one point, it's so intense that Eustace's hat flies off his head, but as he tries to retrieve it, the rest of his clothes blow off his body, leaving him to blow away in only his hat and underwear.

^ Clothing Damage is for destroyed or torn clothing. This is when the clothing is removed due to a hit or sudden movement, usually the next scene shows the character fully clad again no worse for wear. The two can overlap, but need not do so.

Would this count? It is currently listed as an example of The Nudifier on that work's page, but this trope may be more appropriate:

Giant Spiders in A Dance With Rogues have a special attack that strips off the target's armor, and since you cannot put armor on during combat, they have to fight the rest of the encounter stark naked.

In the Phineas And Ferb "The Chronicles of Meap", when Ferb tricks out the spaceship and flies right past Buford and Baljeet, the rush of air as the spaceship flies past them reduces them to their underwear. "Let us never speak of this again."

Calvin is on the receiving end of this a lot, usually from snowballs but occasionally from baseballs. At least once, he's been knocked out of all his clothes, leaving only his underwear.

The Mythbusters went to great lengths to test the "knocked out of your socks" idiom, to the point of hitting a clothed dummy with the equivalents of a wrecking ball or a speeding truck. It never quite panned out as hoped.

Trying to rename this at the same time we're looking to replace or improve a trope that never went through approval in the first place, is making this too difficult. Can we go with this, if manually merged? I'm willing to do that work.

I don't know how to remove tags from a YKTTW, but this doesn't need a 'better name' if we're willing to keep this one for now, and it has plenty of examples now.

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